the fact that individual failures of control often signal a prior institutional failure to shape feeling. We might ask instead what sort of church, school, or family influence was unavailable to the parents of institutionalized patients, who presumably tried to make their children into adequate emotion managers.
* Scientific writing, like scientific talk, has a function similar to that of covering the face and genitalia. It is an extension of institutional control over feeling. The overuse of passive verb forms, the avoidance of “I,” the preference for Latinate nouns, and for the abstract over the concrete, are customs that distance the reader from the topic and limit emotionality. In order to seem scientific, writers obey conventions that inhibit emotional involvement. There is a purpose in such “poor” writing.
* I heard the rationale for this company regulation discussed in class on February 19, 1980. (It was also stated in the training manual.) Whether it has ever been enforced, and with what result, I don’t know.
4
FEELING RULES
A restless vitality wells up as we approach thirty.
—Gail Sheehy
Measuring experience against a normative model set up by doctors, people will be as troubled by departures from the norm as they are troubled by [Gail Sheehy’s] “predictable crises” themselves, against which medical norms are intended to provide reassurance.
—Christopher Lasch
Since feeling is a form of pre-action, a script or a moral stance toward it is one of culture’s most powerful tools for directing action.1 How do we sense these scripts or, as I shall call them, feeling rules? In this chapter we discuss the various ways in which all of us identify a feeling rule and the ways in which we discover that we are out of phase with it—ways which include noting the duration, strength, time, and placement of a feeling. We explore the areas of love, hate, grief, and jealousy, to which these private rules apply.
The purpose of this effort is to expose the outlines of a private emotion system. This system, as we saw in Chapter Three, involves emotion work (deep acting). Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them.
What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. The following snapshots of people caught in moments of emotional deviance, moments in which they stand naked of convention, are not exactly candid shots since people pose even in their confessions. But they are clear pictures of how people see their own actions in relation to emotional convention. And just as we may infer from conscious emotion work the possibility of unconscious forms of it, so we may infer the possibility of unconscious feeling rules, harder to get at but just as probably there.2
How do we recognize a feeling rule? We do so by inspecting how we assess our feelings, how other people assess our emotional display, and by sanctions issuing from ourselves and from them.3 Different social groups probably have special ways in which they recognize feeling rules and give rule reminders, and the rules themselves probably vary from group to group.4 On the whole, I would guess that women, Protestants, and middle-class people cultivate the habit of suppressing their own feelings more than men, Catholics, and lower-class people do. Our culture invites women, more than men, to focus on feeling rather than action; it invites Protestants into an inner dialogue with God, without benefit of church, sacrament, or confession as an intermediary structure; and it invites those in middle-class occupations to manage feeling in service jobs. To the extent that it does these things, the very ways in which we acknowledge feeling rules reflect where we stand on the social landscape. Indeed, the amount of interest people have in feeling rules and emotion work may tend to follow these social lines.
How do we recognize a rule reminder? We can experience it as a private mumbling to ourselves, the voice of a watchful chorus standing to the side of the main stage on which we act and feel.* We also receive rule reminders from others who ask us to account for what we feel.5 A friend might ask, “Why do you feel depressed? You’ve just won the prize you’ve always wanted.” Such friends are generally silent when we feel as they expect us to, when events visibly explain our feeling. A call for account implies that emotional conventions are not in order and must be brought up to consciousness for repair—or, at least in the case of weak conventions, for a checkup. A wink or ironic tone of voice may change the spirit of a rule reminder. Such gestures add a meta-statement: “That’s the feeling rule, all right, but we’re disregarding it, aren’t we?” We are reminded of the rule by being asked to disregard it.
We also know feeling rules by the way others react to what they think we are feeling. These external reactions or “claims”—both as they are intended and as they are interpreted—vary in directness or strength. Some claims are both direct and strong: “You should be ashamed of yourself.” “You have no right to feel so jealous when we agreed to an open marriage.” “You ought to be grateful considering all I’ve done for you.” Other claims may be presented in the guise of questions, as in “Aren’t you just thrilled about Evelyn’s news?” Such a question may actually be meant and understood as a claim, a statement of what another expects. Such questions as “Hey, isn’t this fantastic music?” or “Isn’t this an incredible party?” remind us of what the world expects of the heart. Rule reminders also appear disguised as statements about what we supposedly do feel, as in “You’re just as pleased as punch, I know you are.”
Sanctions common on the social scene—cajoling, chiding, teasing, scolding, shunning—often come into play as forms of ridicule or encouragement that lightly correct feeling and adjust it to convention. Mainly it is the gentle, benign gesture that puts a feeling into line. For instance, one woman recalled: “When I got the news that my father had died, I found that I couldn’t cry over my loss. Everyone of course expected me to cry, and words such as ‘It’s okay to let go’ made me cry just by their suggesiveness.”6
Through the idea of “inappropriate affect,” psychiatrists have had a lot to say about feeling rules. For them, “inappropriate affect” means the absence of expected affect, and from it they infer that a patient is reacting to an event in an unexpected way. When a patient has “an idiosyncratic conceptualization of the event,” the psychiatrist will inspect the patient’s other experiences, especially childhood ones, in order to find something that might account for the feeling.7
What is taken for granted all along is that there are rules or norms according to which feelings may be judged appropriate to accompanying events.8 Like the rest of us, psychiatrists use cultural measures of appropriateness. We, like them, seek reasons for feelings that stand out as strange.
But the psychiatrist and the sociologist take different viewpoints on feelings that do not fit the conventions designed for them. We can get at this difference by comparing how a psychiatrist and a sociologist might analyze the following report by a recent bride:
My marriage ceremony was chaos, unreal, completely different than I imagined it would be. Unfortunately, we rehearsed at eight o’clock the morning of the wedding. I had imagined that everyone would know what to do, but they didn’t. That made me nervous. My sister didn’t help me get dressed or flatter me, and no one in the dressing room helped until I asked. I was depressed.
